On July 1, Rihanna released the long awaited video to her newest single ‘Bitch Better Have My Money‘. We all know that Ri Ri is your typical good-girl who wouldn’t look out of place in a nunnery, and yet in the wake of BBHMM’s NSFW video release infinitely diverse and conflicting opinions have created ripples within the online community. There are those who believe the video is fundamentally anti-feminist, sexist and misogynistic, those who believe it is not, and those who honestly couldn’t care less. Although I assumed I would fall into the latter category after watching the 7-minute long campaign to prove Rihanna is a badass, I actually found myself with seemingly endless amounts of contradictory opinions and questions. If you haven’t seen it already, here’s BBHMM:
The Music Video Everyone’s Talking About:
As far as I can gather, ‘The Accountant’ (aka ‘The Bitch’) owes Rihanna moo-la-la, so she decides to kidnap his wife (model Rachel Roberts) in an attempt to ransom her #Rihannalogic. Somehow it is daylight whilst the wife is inside the mansion/hotel and yet dark outside as Rihanna kidnaps her? Rihanna and her friends then proceed to drive around in their foreign car (I don’t know why that’s a crucial plot point?), do drugs with the wife, hang her upside down in one of those abandoned barns which apparently litter rural America, take her on a boat, have a seedy sleepover, smash a bottle on her head and hide her from a cop underwater.
Alas, it becomes clear that The Accountant doesn’t care very much about his wife’s life, so Rihanna returns to his home and dismembers him à la Dexter. There are clear shots of her picking weapons - each of which features labels such as ‘cheater‘ and ‘fucked up my credit‘ on them - and of The Accountant’s hand and blood scattered on the plastic sheeting. The final scenes show Rihanna stained with blood sitting in a chest of money, because that’s what happens when you smoke weed kids.
Meanwhile, In Real Life:
Many have suggested that this video was inspired by a real incident that occurred between Rihanna and her former accountant Peter Gounis, during which she attempted to sue him for $35 million.
At the beginning of 2009, Rihanna is reported to have had $11 million before she was reduced to a measly $2 million following the purchase of a property in Beverly Hills and her unavailing Last Girl On Earth Tour.
In a 2012 lawsuit, Rihanna accused Peter Gounis, Berdon LLP accounting firm and Berdon partner Michael Mitnick of negligence and gross financial mismanagement. In the lawsuit, Rihanna claims Gounis and Berdon charged exorbitant commission fees - thought to be 23% of her overall income - and were often dishonest with her about her finances. Rihanna also states that Gounis concealed the fact that her tour was losing money and advised her to buy the Beverly Hills mansion despite her swiftly dwindling funds.
Gounis allegedly responded by blaming Rihanna for her ‘near bankruptcy’, claiming she made extravagant purchases and left her tour to act in a movie. After Rihanna failed to appear at a London hearing, Berdon settled out of court for $10 million in February 2014. Rihanna then dropped her $35 million lawsuit in April.
It’s easy to see how people made the connection between real life events and this video, huh?
Is BBHMM Anti-Feminist?
Before we get into this, when discussing feminism I find it’s crucial to define the term as clearly as possible because some people just seem to be baffled by the concept. Put simply, feminism is the belief that everyone, no matter where they land on the gender spectrum, should have equal rights and opportunities. If you believe that all people should be treated equally throughout society then you may identify as a feminist.
One of the main objectives of feminism is to solve or eradicate problematic societal and cultural issues that are harmful to women. For example, how women are portrayed in the media and the pandemic of violence against women are huge issues that feminists hope to dissolve in the future.
So obviously Rihanna swinging a naked woman around like a benippled pendulum isn’t very feminist. This is just one of the numerous examples in BBHMM where the wife is depicted naked and suffering, leading many viewers to suggest Rihanna is glorifying and feeding into the sexual abuse of women. It also leads to questions regarding how the female characters are displayed compared to the male lead. Why is the wife almost consistently nude when she’s being tortured but ol’ Hannibal gets to keep his clothes on? It’s not difficult to answer: women are seen as sexier and less powerful when they’re naked.
Regarding the entire premise of the video, although The Accountant treats his wife’s kidnapping as an opportunity to celebrate, the plot undeniably relies upon the tired trope of using an innocent female to hurt and motivate a big mean man. This trope is often called ‘women in refrigerators‘ and shows up repeatedly in numerous forms of media, presumably because it’s an easy way for writers to give their male characters depth and incentive without actually having to come up with anything too complicated.
So, should you report Rihanna to the police as many commenters including Sarah Vine of The Daily Mail are suggesting? No. They will laugh at you.
Of course, many scenes in this music video are problematic when placed under feminist scrutiny and may perhaps even be offensive to some but it leads me to ask the question: why does Rihanna’s music video need to be feminist?
It’s important that we discuss sexism and misogyny within society and the media, and violence against women is undoubtedly a huge issue that needs to be tackled, but I just don’t think that Rihanna intentionally meant for these misogynist themes to be the centre of her video. Clearly, Rihanna’s primary objective in BBHMM isn’t to make people feel comfortable and fill everyone with warm feelings of equality, peace and love. Like many musicians these days, Rihanna is undoubtedly out to cause controversy, to be provocative, to get her name mentioned and her songs sold. However, Rihanna appears to have another objective which is pretty clear: she’s still sore about what happened with her former accountant and she wants her money back, bitch.
After the challenges she faced in her lawsuit against Gounis, Rihanna is using the platform she’s built as a successful musician to take back her power and convey her wrath like many artists have done before her.
It’s unnerving, a bit gory and undeniably risqué, like Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers and a Tarantino movie have been blended together and stuffed into a 7-minute short film. To be honest, I expect no less these days considering the level of shock value required to create an impact on an audience. BBHMM has a lot in common with your typical R-rated blockbuster movie or violence ridden tv show, arguably the most important factor these mediums share is that they tell a story.
How can we deny Rihanna the chance to express herself and tell her story? Why wouldn’t she create art about her experience and how it affected her?
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a particularly huge fan of Rihanna, if anything I’d forgotten she existed for the past two years and prior to that I associated her with my little sister singing about S&M. Speaking of which, if you’re genuinely shocked by BBHMM then you can’t have been paying attention to Rihanna’s career. She is notorious for her tongue-in-cheek song choices and raunchy videos, and she has never been one to apologise for her creative decisions.
That said, I am deeply confused by the fact that Rihanna is herself a victim of domestic abuse and yet makes a video about torturing someone, that’s perhaps one of the most revealing aspects of the video. Still, if that’s what she wants to create and what she wants to portray to the world then fair enough.
Despite her past, Rihanna has accomplished something numerous popular musicians are continually failing to do: she has actually been genuine about her inner most feelings, represented it artistically and in the process she has created a discussion. Rihanna is a successful musician, actress, director, designer and entrepreneur who earlier this year became the first black woman to lead a Dior campaign. What I took away from the lines between the footage is that Rihanna refuses to hide her anger in fear that she’ll be labeled a batshit crazy bitch, she won’t be taken advantage of by anyone and she’s a badass. Rihanna is a powerful, strong, successful woman but one thing she is not is responsible for is your feelings.
I also saw a couple of comments earlier on that suggested that Rihanna is being racist because she chose a white, blonde, rich woman complete with fancy mansion and tiny dog to be her victim throughout the majority of her video.
Now, we all know why this archetypal character comes into play, and it’s not because Rihanna is a massive racist and wants to swing all white people around like a bag of cats. I can’t deny it and this is fundamentally wrong but I have to admit that when I think ‘rich accountant’s fancy wife’ I picture a skinny, blonde, white woman. Also, it’s well documented in society that white women get a hell of a lot more attention than any other race when it comes to kidnappings and murders, which is far more worrying than this video.
So, I can’t quite capture the logic of all the offended, chalky naysayers stating things like “BLACK PEOPLE WANT TO KILL ALL WHITE PEOPLE” because the wife is white. No, Captain Privilege, I’m pretty sure they don’t. Again, this is a music video not a How To manual. Also, one of Rihanna’s accomplices in the video is a blonde white woman? Calm your tits, this isn’t the right place for your paranoid reverse-racism rants.
What genuinely worries me about this video though, is that there are people out there who genuinely believe this sort of footage will encourage violence in society. I mean come on, this is a music video not a dangerous shooty-shooty video game after all. Other people sharing fake, violent imagery in the name of creativity does not and should not incite you to partake in said violence. It’s obviously not acceptable to treat women or men in the manner Rihanna does in made-up-music-video-land and so the moral outrage just seems unnecessary. If you’re a normal human being chances are this video isn’t going to make you think “hmm, today I’m going to get lunch - maybe a nice turkey sandwich - and then I’m going to go kidnap a lady”. If you think that you need to go find a doctor or the police, like, now.
I, for one, am thankful that we have more female artists than ever who are willing to create something that’s a little bit risky. I mean, thank god Rihanna’s not still singing about umbrellas, amirite?
If you’ve managed to get this far into my ramblings, I’m sure you’ve realised that I’m not really sure what my finite opinion is on BBHMM. In regards to my original question: BBHMM is decidedly not a feminist video, but that doesn’t make it inherently anti-feminist as perhaps it doesn’t need and was never meant to be perceived through feminism-tinted glasses. What I do know for certain is that Rihanna is renowned for being a bad girl, and she has certainly succeeded in finalising that image with BBHMM. What do you guys think?
